Method and apparatus for assessing the status of work waiting for service

Abstract

The present invention provides a system and method for assessing the status of work waiting for service in a work queue or a work pool. Work items are placed in the work queue or work pool and have a service time goal. The work items in the work queue or work pool are scanned and a required queue position for each work item is calculated according to the amount of time remaining prior to the expiration of the service time goal and weighted advance time for servicing of work items in the work queue or pool. An array of counters has elements which correspond to required queue positions. Upon the calculation of the required queue position for a work item, the counter corresponding to the required queue position is incremented. When all of the work items are scanned, the array of counters is analyzed to predict a future state of the work queue or work pool.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION The present invention is directed to the scheduling of work items in a resource allocation system. In particular, the present invention is directed to service time goals for work items in a queue awaiting service, and assessing the status of work items in queue relative to their service time goals. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION In present day automatic contact distribution (ACD) systems, resource selection and allocation algorithms are commonly employed to perform calculations related to timing of operations and service time goals for work items in queue. These calculations are performed, for example, when a telephone call is received at a call center. When such a call is received, it is typically assigned to a pool of resources responsible for answering telephone calls. Furthermore, such calls generally have a service time goal, such as three minutes, which is the goal for an agent to answer the call. These service time goals are useful to help ensure a custo...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

These service time goals are useful to help ensure a customer is not waiting to speak to an agent for a long period of time, which may reduce customer satisfaction.

Due to the random and peaked nature of inbound contacts from customers, a contact center may become overloaded when no suitable resources are available to handle contacts as the service time goal for the contacts expires.

Furthermore, a contact center may have sufficient resources to handle present contacts which have service time goals currently expiring, but may not have enough resources to handle the contacts which have a service time goal at some point in the future.

However, such techniques generally look at only the head of the queue, in order to determine if the contact center is currently behind target, or is in a state of immediate risk.

Another problem with such techniques is that they were designed for real time servicing.

One problem with placing contacts in an unordered work pool is that resource allocation algorithms are generally designed to operate using ordered work pools.

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